topic Re: REMOVE BEST MATCH SCAM in Selling

REMOVE BEST MATCH SCAM

comcol — Wed, 02 Jul 2014 03:43:36 GMT

The only way this Best match scam can be removed is for a large amount of sellers to demand action on it.

The majority of sellers have seen large drops in their sales which have all gone to 1 or 2 sellers in each catagory.

Ebay clearly wants this and refuses to accept any suggestion that it does not work.

Their supposed 'criteria' to move up the best match engine has been proven utterly false on several occasions.

Ebay needs to remove it as a default setting at the very least.

Best match guarentee either the cheapest prices, best service or best quality on a product what so ever.

It simply allows the protected seller to dominate and take sales away from other good sellers.

TIME TO TAKE ACTION SELLERS

Re: REMOVE BEST MATCH SCAM

2011.narelle — Wed, 02 Jul 2014 05:29:55 GMT

I'm really not convinced about best match is the search that most buyers use.Don't most people search price lowest to highwst or price+postage lowest to highest?

I really do think that the ridiculous best search is overrated in a sellers annoyance with eBay.I could be wrong but i never use it unless I'm bored & looking to see how far back my items are after new sellers or ppl with terrible feedback.

Anyway,eBay don't care what sellers think,so any protest or whinging about that will fall on deaf ears.ie the fvf on postage & the defective defect system.All that carp will probably affect your sales more than any best match search.

Re: REMOVE BEST MATCH SCAM

kizacks — Wed, 02 Jul 2014 06:32:31 GMT

"The majority of sellers have seen large drops in their sales which have all gone to 1 or 2 sellers in each catagory. "

Amen on that! Most buyer's won't bother looking half way down the page anymore, let alone changing the sort results. Thank god I don't devote most of my time on here anymore. I can sell 30 items one day on Ebay, and 0 the next ....

Re: REMOVE BEST MATCH SCAM

bsal6160 — Wed, 02 Jul 2014 06:50:49 GMT

As a buyer only I search "Ending Soonest". No point having it otherwise. If by the time you search and find the item you want,,,too bad,,so sad,, it has ended.

Re: REMOVE BEST MATCH SCAM

clarry100 — Wed, 02 Jul 2014 07:33:49 GMT

Our particular category is flooded by Chinese sellers located in HK or other parts of China.

They can sell at a small fraction of us mainly due the cheap postage they get.

However, we offer far quicker postage and I am sure much better quality and customer service.

So... We would like to see the default search set to items located in Australia only.

Then a buyer can change that to ALL if they wish.

When we do that search our products come way up near the top of the search results.

We are very sure that our buyers rely heavily on best match search. Hence when our items do come up towards the top our sales improve and vice-versa.

Re: REMOVE BEST MATCH SCAM

davewil1964 — Wed, 02 Jul 2014 07:37:07 GMT

@vegacomputers wrote:
The only way this Best match scam can be removed is for a large amount of sellers to demand action on it.

The majority of sellers have seen large drops in their sales which have all gone to 1 or 2 sellers in each catagory.

Ebay clearly wants this and refuses to accept any suggestion that it does not work.

Their supposed 'criteria' to move up the best match engine has been proven utterly false on several occasions.

Ebay needs to remove it as a default setting at the very least.

Best match guarentee either the cheapest prices, best service or best quality on a product what so ever.
It simply allows the protected seller to dominate and take sales away from other good sellers.

TIME TO TAKE ACTION SELLERS

Care to provide some figures, ie those that have even claimed this as a % of total sellers, or even those who have experienced this (even if they haven't told anybody) as a % of total sellers.

As there are fewer than 100 categories, you are saying only 200 sellers out of the millions on eBay are selling anything. To people who use BM anyway.

Re: REMOVE BEST MATCH SCAM

i-love-my-sheep — Wed, 02 Jul 2014 08:36:27 GMT

@bsal6160 wrote:
As a buyer only I search "Ending Soonest". No point having it otherwise. If by the time you search and find the item you want,,,too bad,,so sad,, it has ended.

I only use the Ending Soonest too for the reasons you mentioned. Most of what I search for results in thousands of results and by the time you scroll through them all, what you want has ended. Rarely I will use the lowest price option, but that is only if I'm looking for a BIN item. I don't think I've ever used the Best Match option. Mine is set to Ending Soonest by default.

Re: REMOVE BEST MATCH SCAM

comcol — Wed, 02 Jul 2014 11:55:00 GMT

The problem is best match is set as the default and many buyers don't even realise this and so do not change it.

Ebay also lies by stating best match offers the best price, best service etc and that simply is not the case.

With the above two issues, buyers are manipulated into believing that using the best match will give them the best item.

This is proven simply by the large numbers of sales the top 1-2 sellers have and the fact that 90plus % of the auctions in the first 20 pages are the same sellers and no matter what, it never changes. (speaking for the computer catagory myself. I am sure this occurs in all catagories from what I have heard and read).

Buyers have complained about prices rising and quality dropping on Ebay and this is the reason why. Ebays deliberate protection of 1-2 buyers in the catagory.

Re: REMOVE BEST MATCH SCAM

i-love-my-sheep — Wed, 02 Jul 2014 12:41:58 GMT

I was searching just now on a worldwide view on ebay US and decided to hit best match to see what happened. Would you believe one my my auctions was the very first one?! The item has had 28 page views, 7 watchers, 1 bid and less than 15 minutes to go.

My other near identical item was nowhere to be found in the first hundred listings (of 14,000+ results). There was a mix of sellers from all over the world, from China, HK, France, UK, US, Canada to name just a few. There wasn't any one or 2 really featuring heavily. I still prefer the ending soonest option though.

Something unrelated that I just noticed, the 'look' of the search results is different.......

Re: REMOVE BEST MATCH SCAM

phorum_junkie* — Wed, 02 Jul 2014 13:57:28 GMT

I rarely search for my own items as my sales usually remain pretty consistent with expected ups and downs but sometimes when sellers are complaining about BM I will give it a go and sometimes find a couple of my items on the first page, sometimes nowhere in the first 400 but there seems to be no correlation between me showing in BM and selling more or less.

Re: REMOVE BEST MATCH SCAM

phonebite — Wed, 02 Jul 2014 14:40:29 GMT

I think it is a bit misleading calling Best Match a scam. When I think scam, I think someone trying to steal your money.

I am all up for a system where it would show Australian Sellers first as it would benefit most of us but I wouldn't say this current system is a scam. Broken maybe.. but not a scam in my opinion.

Re: REMOVE BEST MATCH SCAM

phonebite — Wed, 02 Jul 2014 14:43:22 GMT

It really is up to the buyer on what they want. If they want quality goods, then they probably look at a well priced product anyways. I think most buyers go for something cheaper on eBay.. I mean thats probably the only thing I hear about when people talk about eBay.. the cheapness.

Re: REMOVE BEST MATCH SCAM

comcol — Wed, 02 Jul 2014 17:05:57 GMT

The trouble is when a single catagory has 7000 items a buyer is only going to look at a couple of hundred. When ebay falsely claims the best price and quality is what you get with 'best match' it manipulates buyers into purchasing those at the top.

An auction site is supposed to be time ending. That is what the default setting should be. It is then fair for everyone.

I personally went from 40-50 systems a week to 2-3 when best match came in. I have literally put systems on where I am losing a fair bit of money on them just to see if it moves them up in the best match and not a single one sells. No matter what price etc the item it will never be anywhere in best match.

Yet, Ebay is allowing one seller use multiple ID's and with those they have stolen from a LOT of buyers. Ebay KNOWS this and is ignoring it. Pretty good proof they are manipulating the system trying to drive sellers out whilst protecting certain sellers. Along with a couple of other sellers we even provided the evidence of what was going on and they totally ignore it.

Re: REMOVE BEST MATCH SCAM

clarry100 — Wed, 02 Jul 2014 22:41:20 GMT

Hi PJ,

We can clearly tell that BM ranking correlates with sales volume in our category.

We use the same test search all the time to check. "baby girl headbands" with no other flters set. These three words are used in the tiltles of most of our listings. Along with others of course. We use up all the 80 characters available if we can.

Interestingly if we include the filter "located in Aust only". Then the vast majority of our litings show up inside the top 200 or so. This eliminates all the Chinese sellers and leaves only the very small handful of Aussie sellers in our category. If we could have this as a default setting I'm quite sure we would sell more than we could handle.

When our sales are waning we find that little or none of our listings are inside the top 500 results.

When sales are up we find that quite a few are up inside the top 500 results.

Very occasionally we get a big run on a particular product. When this happens we find that this particular listing is right up on page #1 of the results.

So from this it really looks to us like the buyers in our category are heavily reliant on BM to find their items.

Of course, this may not be the same across all categories.

Re: REMOVE BEST MATCH SCAM

comcol — Thu, 03 Jul 2014 03:24:09 GMT

That is all best match relates to. Sales.

The MAJOR problem with that is if the same sellers are always on top in best match (and as a result get all the sales) then it makes it impossible for other sellers to ever move up the list when there are thousands of auctions in that catagory.

That is why best match is falsely manipulating the system.

Re: REMOVE BEST MATCH SCAM

clarry100 — Thu, 03 Jul 2014 03:32:28 GMT

... and once all the smaller sellers give up and leave becasue they cannot make a buck, then where is ebay.

Left with a few large sellers in every category.

Maybe this is what they want for whatever reason.

Re: REMOVE BEST MATCH SCAM

*crikey*mate* — Thu, 03 Jul 2014 04:29:10 GMT

Maybe it is the categories and how many sellers are in those categories?

On my PC a little while ago, I am on the first page in 4 dif categories. I'm not a big seller by any means, but they are smallish categories. I guess if there are a lot of listings in a specific category, that only so many can feature on the first page at a specific time.

Also, from memory, Clarry and I were looking at best match searches a few months ago and what showed on my best match was different to what showed on his best match.

The way I work with the eBay searches is to target the searches I can control, such as ending soonest and those with price considerations. Best Match and how it is determined seems to be a mystery, even to eBay.

When I list something new, I find my sales increase, and not necessarily for that item, but I think when I list new, that item shows up high in someone's search results. If I can, I will go for lowest price + postage (though that can change as soon as someone else lists something), or if I can't do that will go for highest product and postage but often include best offer. Sometimes you can't though, so those you just have to take it as you come, but if you can get at least a few of your items to show high in some of the categories that can be controlled (to an extent) you at least have a shot at being seen and having p[eople see "what else I have".

It has been equally successful for me to have some loss leaders - very popular, highly sought after brands/items, but in categories where I have other things of that nature/brand that someone may also buy - and also have a couple of items priced quite high. Usually they sit there, but other things then sell, or sometimes, you get surprised and someone will buy it and not even put in best offer. Happenned twice this morning.

I have few return customers as I change my product often, and also sell it in cycles. I just list things I find that I think will sell rather than focus on one category, but I try to have a few different things in that category when I do list in it so that when I do manage to catch someone's attention and get them to look, I have more things to provide a choice in the area they are interested, and just maybe, they may look into another area as well.

Re: REMOVE BEST MATCH SCAM

comcol — Fri, 04 Jul 2014 08:06:25 GMT

yeah I knew sometime before the Best match came out that it was being brought in by Ebay. I knew someone who worked there and they were bringing it in to do exactly as you mentioned: to get rid of all sellers except for 2 or 3 per catagory if possible. No idea what they think that will achieve except to turn people off the site as prices will and have gone up.

Unfortunately, the majority of buyers do not change the settings and they always use best match search.

As a result, it is simply impossible to ever sell much (no matter how much cheaper your items are) in a large catagory.

My sales dropped 1000% the first month best match came in and it has never really improved.

I even list some items where I lose a good $50 on each sale just to see if it ever moves up in best match but it never does. Customers dont even buy them because they simple can never find them.

I have some 15% of total adds in the catagory yet not a single one is even in the top 700 listings. Pointless.

It sure does no help when Ebay is colluding with sellers who are stealing from buyers either. I think everyone would be shocked at the evidence I have on that.

Re: REMOVE BEST MATCH SCAM

davewil1964 — Fri, 04 Jul 2014 08:16:08 GMT

Bugga, no laptops. I've decided my next PC needs to be a laptop.

Re: REMOVE BEST MATCH SCAM

runninmt — Mon, 07 Jul 2014 12:13:36 GMT

The ebay product is laughably diluted and they send customers to google adword websites routinely .. the search engine is completely stuffed too .. best match is another disgusting ebay lie .. I have no idea what a professional seller can do here these days aside from loose their shirt .. IMO ebay is now like some bizzaroland gambling casino .. best match at the very best is like some kind of moumental stuffup that gets tweaked on a near daily basis .. overall a joke and affront to people's intelligence ..